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New submitter drdread66 writes “Cisco seems to be giving up on another technology acquisition. Hot on the heels of a full writedown for shuttering Flip Video, Cisco is now looking at another potentially huge loss from unloading Linksys.”

UnanimousCoward writes “Several outlets are reporting Cisco’s intent to acquire Meraki for $1.2 billion. From the article: ‘Cisco Systems of San Jose, California, says it is buying Meraki Networks of San Francisco for around $1.2 billion in cash. The news of the deal leaked on Twitter, when Cisco accidentally posted the news on its blog and swiftly removed it, but it was too late. Cisco is hoping to focus on smaller and medium-sized campuses with Meraki and its products.’”

UnanimousCoward writes “Several outlets are reporting Cisco’s intent to acquire Meraki for $1.2 billion. From the article: ‘Cisco Systems of San Jose, California, says it is buying Meraki Networks of San Francisco for around $1.2 billion in cash. The news of the deal leaked on Twitter, when Cisco accidentally posted the news on its blog and swiftly removed it, but it was too late. Cisco is hoping to focus on smaller and medium-sized campuses with Meraki and its products.’”

CWmike writes “Eugene Kaspersky, the $800-million Russian cybersecurity tycoon, is, by his own account, out to ‘save the world’ with an exploit-proof operating system. Given the recent declarations from U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and others that the nation is facing a ‘digital Pearl Harbor’ or ‘digital 9/11′ from hostile nation states like Iran, this sounds like the impossible dream come true — the cyber version of a Star Wars force field. But on this side of that world in need of saving, the enthusiasm is somewhat tempered. One big worry: source. ‘The real question is, do you trust the people who built your system? The answer had better be yes,’ said Gary McGraw, CTO of Cigital. Kaspersky’s products are among the top ranked worldwide, are used by an estimated 300 million people and are embraced by U.S. companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Juniper Networks. But while he considers himself at some level a citizen of the world, he has close ties to Russian intelligence and Vladimir Putin. Part of his education and training was sponsored by the KGB, he is a past Soviet intelligence officer (some suspect he has not completely retired from that role) and he is said have a ‘deep and ongoing relationship with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB,’ the successor to the KGB and the agency that operates the Russian government’s electronic surveillance network.”

McGruber writes “Michael Baxter, the network engineer at the southeastern regional headquarters of Verizon Wireless who submitted hundreds of fraudulent service requests to Cisco, has been sentenced to four years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Baxter was also ordered to pay $2.3 million in restitution to Cisco Systems, and $462,828 in restitution to Verizon. Instead of placing the replacement parts into service in the Verizon Wireless network, Baxter took the parts home and sold them to third-party re-sellers for his own profit. He used the money to buy cars, jewelry and multiple cosmetic surgeries for his girlfriend.”

Myrv writes “Reports have started popping up that Cisco is pushing out and automatically (without permission) installing their new Cloud Connect firmware on consumer routers. The new firmware removes the user’s ability to login and administer the router locally. You now must configure the router using Cisco’s Cloud connect service. If that wasn’t bad enough, the fine print for this new service allows Cisco to track your complete internet history. Currently, it appears the only way to disable the Cloud Connect service is to unplug your router from the internet.”

With today’s celebration of World IPv6 Launch 2012, the Internet is doing something new: growing. And that growth comes none too soon as the rise of the Internet of Things places unprecedented new demands on worldwide Internet infrastructure.

Google, Yahoo and Facebook are amongst the leaders in the growing charge to adopt the critically needed Internet addressing system known as IPv6, which is generally reagarded as the viable only solution for the stagnation of the Internet.

World IPv6 Launch 2012 brings together “major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers and web companies around the world… to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services,” starting today.

Here’s why, by the numbers:

In 1973, when Vint Cerf and his team put together the networking rules for what would become the Internet, they used an addressing system with 32 bits of addressing space – the well-known 192.X.X.X IPv4 system in use today. This gave the fledgling Internet the capacity for 4.3 billion individual addresses; far more than Cerf and his team could even conceive of needing back then.

Severely Mis-Underestimated

Obviously, Cerf and everyone else severely underestimated the growth of the Internet and all the various ways it would be used. More than just a system to share files and images, the Internet has become a platform for commerce and communication that eventually dwarfed the telephone network, the only comparable network on the planet.

That growth has led us to the problem we have today. According to Cerf – who took part in a Google Hangout Tuesday afternoon, there are currently 5.5 billion mobile devices in the world. If each one of them were to need an IP address (and that’s likely to be true in the very near future), they alone would require more than the available Internet addresses under IPv4. New devices simply would not be able to connect.

Fortunately Cerf and others saw this bottleneck coming. In 1996 they put together a new addressing protocol, IPv6, with 128 bits of address space. That means IPv6 can accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. That should be enough for a while.

But the transition to IPv6 has been slow, as many organizations hesitate to make the needed efforts. Comcast IPv6 architect John Jason Brzozowski estimated that Comcast is seeing about five percent of users able to support IPv6 right now, though that number is steadily rising.

Today’s public moves by major websites like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner Cable to completely switch to always-on IPv6 operations represents the first big addition of IPv6 connectivity since the protocol was launched in 1996. Joined by networking vendors such as Akamai and Cisco, this year’s efforts will begin to implement IPv6 broadly while keeping IPv4 connectivity on in parallel. Internet users, regardless of their connectivity status, should not notice any changes to the way they venture around the Internet.

Why Bother?

Given that so few are even trying IPv6, why is it so important to adopt it?

In addition to making it possible for more devices to connect directly to the Net, faster and more granular connectivity could be another major benefit. IPv6 is not inherently faster, but because of the increasing shortage of device addresses, said Cisco fellow Mark Townsley, right now many devices have to aim their connectivity to other devices through the cloud.

As IPv6 becomes more widely adopted, Townsley explained, individual devices will be more able to directly connect to each other, without having to depend on the cloud as intermediary.

Looking forward a bit farther, widely heralded hardware-based networks, often called the “Internet of Things,” depends on IPv6 to make room for new connected devices.

Forget 5.5 billion mobile devices. Imagine the possibility of billions, even trillions of pieces of hardware connected to the Internet, all sending out signals as simple as “this pen is out of ink” or as important as “someone is having a stroke that they don’t feel yet.”

Vendors are already lining up to create devices that leverage this capability. For example, More Than 50% of Devices at CES Were Internet Connected. Some hardware vendors, like Cosm (formerly Pachube) live in that space right now – helping device makers create devices that communicate efficiently and reliably on an increasingly crowded Internet. Because of its very mission, of course, Cosm has been IPv6-ready for quite some time.

Traffic Jams Ahead?

The picture is not all roses and sunshine: with the increase of devices will come an accompanying rise in traffic. Looking at the kind of data generated by the Internet of Things, many devices send small packets of data which shouldn’t overwhelm data networks. But as smarter devices handle larger pieces of unstructured data – and video streams – network saturation could become a very real problem.

Fortunately, we won’t have to deal with it all at once. In the Google Hangout, Cerf emphasized that the introduction of IPv6 is not so much a switch, but a transparent adoption of IPv6 connectivity as time goes on. And Google IPv6 engineers Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline added that since many networking devices are starting to be sold with built-in IPv6 and IPv4 features, the change to IPv6 is often technically not very challenging.

At Google, Colitti explained, “the problem is very wide, but not very deep.” Meaning that while he and Kline would have to find any software or device within Google that depended on IP addressing, actually flipping the switch once the code or device was identified was relatively simple. Both engineers expect that other organizations will have similar experiences.

The good news is that IPv6 is in place now and will be ready for organizations to use as they move to it. There’s no Y2K deadline of doom hanging over our heads. But companies looking to establish deeper connectivity with customers – and especially those planning to connect large numbers of mobile devices and IP hardware and applications - should consider beginning a gradual transition to the new addressing protocol.

Or you could simply wait until you find your percentage of IPv6 traffic. The nice thing to remember is this: virtually all networking software and devices will be able to handle both protocols for some time to come.

alphadogg writes “Cisco is slowly killing off its Cius business tablet less than a year after it started shipping. The Android-based collaboration tool, which featured a 7-inch touchscreen and was not intended to challenge more consumer-oriented tablets such as the Apple iPad, fell victim to the BYOD trend and cloud computing, Cisco said in a blog post. Cisco will instead ‘double down’ on software offerings like its Jabber and WebEx products for more popular tablets and smartphones supporting a variety of operating systems.”

With the lackluster first day issue of Facebook on Friday, we thought we would take a moment to look at the memorable tech IPOs of the past and see how they have fared over the years. While the first day “pop” of some companies can generate news, what is more important is the longer-term performance of the stock – say, after three years of trading. The chart above shows some of these percentage gains – and losses.

One of the more memorable first-day increases was the doubling of share price for Netscape Corp. when it went public back in 1995 to raise the then-unheard-of sum of $1.6 billion. That’s less than 2% of what Facebook raised on Friday. Akamai raised twice what Netscape did in 1999 and had an increase of more than 450% in its first-day share price, only to fall to Earth three years later (thanks to the tech bust) and trade at 1% of its offering price. Ouch. Even Apple had “only” a 31% increase when it raised $3.4 billion in 1980 at its public offering. Three years after its IPO, it was down 25%. (Now is another story, of course.) And Paypal, which made billions for its owners and spawned an entire ecosystem of startups, was trading flat from its IPO three years later.

The biggest three-year percentage increases of popular tech stocks were Yahoo, with a 3,500% increase from its IPO, and Amazon, which rose more than 2,700%. Both benefitted from being on the right side of the tech bubble when they went public. Yet Yahoo has had its problems, as we have documented in the past. The last time its stock price broke 100 was at the end of 1999, and it hasn’t been anywhere in that neighborhood since then (right now, it is trading in the teens). Certainly, tech stocks are hot right now, and many – apart from Cisco and Microsoft – are close to their all-time highs including IBM and Amazon, both trading around 200.

One interesting trend not shown in the numbers is that all of the recent tech IPOs have come into the public markets with dual classes of stock shares, meaning that the public shares carry less voting rights (or in some cases, absolutely none) when it comes time for that annual shareholder meeting. Google will have three classes of shares next month: one for the founders, one for the public and then one with absolutely no voting power whatsoever that it will issue for dividends, employee incentive plans and acquisitions. LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and Yelp all have dual-class shares. James Surowiecki, writing in the New Yorker, says that this may “make the stock market less central to American capitalism.” A sobering thought indeed.

So what can we learn from this trip down memory lane? Just this: The first three years of a public tech company can be very chaotic times with regard to its stock. Some of the most successful companies didn’t make much money for normal shareholders. So if you are going to invest in a startup, start early, in its pre-money stage. Of course, that is pretty risky, too.

DesScorp writes “The Charleston Gazette is reporting that the state of West Virginia has purchased hundred of enterprise class routers from Cisco at over $22,000 dollars apiece via federal stimulus money. The stimulus cash was intended to spread broadband coverage. The problem is that the routers are overkill, and are being placed in small schools and libraries with just a handful of users. The West Virginia Office of Technology warned that the purchase was ‘grossly oversized’ for the intended uses, but the purchase went through anyway. Curiously, the project is being headed up not by the state’s usual authorities on such matters, but by Jimmy Gianato, West Virginia’s Homeland Security Chief. In addition to the $24 million contract signed with Verizon Network Integration to provide the routers and maintenance, Gianato asked for additional equipment and services that tacked an additional $2.26 million to the bill. Perhaps the worst part is that hundreds of the routers are sitting in their boxes, unused, two years after the purchase.”